Bartimaeus

And Lower Resistance, as you might expect, is subject to neither spell resistance or saves. Um...probably. Honestly, I can't differentiate between Spell Revisions spells and what they used to be in vanilla anymore.

Is dominate and confusion not subject to spell resistance? I thought magic resistance mean % to negate a spell being cast on you. Second sentence first: that's correct, but some spells (or, to be technical, their effects) simply are not subject to it. As in, they will go right through regardless of what your magic resistance is. I couldn't say absolutely for dominate/charm, but I would guess that the standard mage/cleric variants are very likely subject to it. Any innate variants I would be less sure about.

Some spells are not subject to magic resistance, just as some are not subject to saves, (though very few are both). I always thought vanilla Carsomyr was ridiculously powerful. Maybe not for pure melee combat, but that's hardly ever challenging anyways when you've got your own spellcaster or two. I like to play with Item Revisions, which nerfs it rather nicely against spellcasters, but increases its regular combat capabilities: Special Abilities (once per day): Dispel Magic: dispels all magical effects upon any creature in a 30 feet radius Equipped Abilities: Magic Resistance: +20% bonus Combat Abilities: Dispelling: removes all magical effects upon the target (save vs. spell neg.) Holy: deals 3 additional points of damage against all of evil alignment THAC0: +4 bonus Damage: 2D6 + 4 Damage type: slashing Weight: 10 Speed Factor: 6 Proficiency Type: Two-Handed Sword Type: 2-handed Requires: 16 Strength Usable By: Paladins

http://www.clipartbest.com/cliparts/niE/RoL/niERoLxiA.png

The source of the mod in question usually matters more than the mod itself. I wouldn't worry at all about downloading anything that's had more than a dozen downloads from the Nexus.

Carsomyr? The weapon that gave 50% magic resistance on equip and dispelled magic without save/resist on every hit? Carsomyr +5? +6 if you upgrade it? ...

You're really buying that crap? Every new government in history always said "the previous administration was a disaster and worked miraculously" to justify its present shortcomings. And you really bought into this centuries old excuse? Please... You've never seen the code, so why are you repeating someone else's bullcrap like it's an established fact? I have to 100% agree with Nep on this one Bester, sorry but I have to be honest Just curious, but on what basis are you making that agreement? Both Nepenthe and Bester make, in my opinion, valid points - yet neither one is substantiated (so far) in this case, so why believe - especially "100%" - either way?

I think the XP is fine—you shouldn't be forced to complete sidequests to be able to advance the main quest without being gimped. If you do absolutely every quest available to you, including possibly killing any dragons you come across, it shouldn't be surprising that you end up being overpowered. Also, by the time you are ready to take the thieves or Bodhi up on their offer, you will be way over 20k, which is hard to justify from a roleplaying perspective. Don't get me wrong, that's the way I used to play it, too. But I wouldn't say it's a design flaw. In one of the many balance mods I used to have, the Shadow Thieves' fee was raised IIRC to 80k... and I still had plenty of money to go around and buy high level scrolls and stuff. If, on the other hand, you are referring to how XP completely breaks the game if you are playing a solo Kensai/Mage, that's another story... Sorry, I didn't mean to imply it was a flaw, per se, as I agree - you're absolutely right. But I've always completed pretty much everything when I go through the game, so I find that the game completely breaks (for me!) unless all XP rewarded is scaled to at least 75% of the original - though I'm actually tempted to try 50%. Sword Coast Stratagems, the mod I just mentioned earlier, has that fee increaser component you just spoke of...and an additional magic license fee increaser. The amount of money you can make in the game is also ridiculous if you do everything, as you mentioned.

My dad tried to treat his depression with alcohol. He became an alcoholic, and as a result of related transgressions, his entire family left him. Poor guy. Alcohol seems like a pretty poor treatment plan to me, but that's just my anecdote.

A game where you never have to retry (or aren't allowed to) sounds like a game where you don't have to try at all to begin with, (whether it's a result of the game naturally being easy or because you've gotten good at it), and seems rather boring. Not to mention I like playing with Sword Coast Stratagems, (AI/difficulty enhancing mod), combined with a rewarded XP reducer. There's too much XP rewarded in the game, IMO. Mmmmm....I hate it when people use logic and truth to dispute my words I try! Although...I have to point out what I said wasn't strictly true, just generally so...but I'm sure you were aware of that. (e: a word)

A game where you never have to retry (or aren't allowed to) sounds like a game where you don't have to try at all to begin with, (whether it's a result of the game naturally being easy or because you've gotten good at it), and seems rather boring. Not to mention I like playing with Sword Coast Stratagems, (AI/difficulty enhancing mod), combined with a rewarded XP reducer. There's too much XP rewarded in the game, IMO. At this point, thanks to having to play smarter due to difficulty enhancing mods and having played for years and years, it'd probably be fairly easy to do an iron run of vanilla BG(2). But since vanilla BG(2) doesn't interest me, oh well. (e): The last time I played through BG2, (a 3/4th of a year or so ago?), my party (of 4) was epic level before I made it to Chapter 3, (Chapter 3 starting after you side with either Bodhi or the Shadow Thieves). I completed all of Watcher's Keep and did most of the non-main quest sidequests before that. I gave up the run after that, of course, because my game was completely broken.

I said "maybe"! That implies I'm not really sure either way and therefore am not necessarily making a judgement. ...maybe

That's pretty crappy. Was that the initial version of the game, first patch, latest patch or close to, or..? Either way, sounds pretty unacceptable, especially since those companion quests are pretty major, and not being able to restore a companion from Imprison is also somewhat drastic...particularly if you saved after the battle it happened and went wandering around for a Freedom scroll and lost saves prior to the battle thinking you could restore them.

As Woldan said, be proactive. I say that because I've heard it's supposed to be great for at least helping to treat depression...and I personally was not and am still not and I don't think it'd be entirely incorrect to say that I'm at least partially insane as a result. To be fair to myself, though, I was a bit anorexic at the time, so it would've been hard to be physically active without magically fixing that, too. And...honestly, I still don't eat entirely right. Ah, the joys of moderate (but greatly varied) neurosis...

lol maybe by your logic

I find taking an occasional intellectual **** is good for the soul. I actually wrote that post as an addendum to yours - in support - not as any sort of retort. I (basically) agree with all of your statements...at least on this issue. "Opinion" news shows I, too, find incredibly unappealing. As if I needed any additional bias in my life by filtering it through more people who clearly have agendas, whether I am for them or not. I've pretty much given up on all TV news, except perhaps local news in very small doses. I like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in small doses, too, - primarily because they actually are pretty funny - but find that I can't really stomach watching them much, either. TV really just isn't my thing these days. @Valsuelm: No, I disagree. A person intrinsically, for no "absolute" - absolute in the sense of being completely reinforced by something else - decides that some things are right, and that some things are wrong. As an example, most people believe that murder is "wrong" - not all, but most. Why? Such a concept, the innate wrongness of killing, does not exist anywhere else in the animal kingdom, (not that its existence elsewhere would justify it, mind you). Yet most of us have decided that it is indeed wrong - evil, even. It is a fiction - a social construct - that we have completely made up, and one that most of us choose to follow. Any rationalization you could use to explain our belief in its "wrongness" is similarly unabsolute - such lines of thought are (at least to my knowledge) completely circular and recursive. What's even worse, I think, is that though most of us believe killing is wrong, many of us also believe that certain conditions can make it unwrong, whether intellectually (really thinking it's no longer wrong) or in actuality (still thinking it's wrong, but assigning no blame/consequences for it). Apply this principal to less extreme examples, where more people disagree with each other - abortion, as an amusing (to me, as it's still to do with "killing") example - and you find that such biases paint the lives of every single person. There's no [human] logical root to why we believe what we do, or value what we do, yet such beliefs and values still persist. Not that I think that's necessarily a bad thing. Humans would be very boring otherwise, I think. I think the only type of person that is intellectually unbiased is the person that completely lacks any sort of intellect - sapience - to begin with. And even then, only intellectually. There'd still be behavioral - as in, what we actually do - biases. Dang. I did it again.

Clarification, TrueNeutral: Imprisonment's duration is normally permanent. Do you mean the spell "Freedom" didn't restore the Imprisoned character(s)? "all joinable NPCs except for the romance options no longer trigger any dialogues" Not that normally romance-able characters of the same gender as you hardly ever freaking talked, anyways...stupid BioWare NPCs...

I think another important realization is that literally everyone is biased in some manner of speaking, whether it be wholly and knowingly so, or more subtly and "acceptably" so. Literally everyone has different values for literally everything - whether those values in things be essentially nonexistent or the "single issue" for a person. I, for example, highly value U.S. hegemony - but I also value liberty, and making sure that the U.S. deserves its hegemony status. This is a balancing act for myself, but in general, I tend to support foreign U.S. actions - as it seems most actions are to do with either maintaining or expanding our power - except when it seems the problems in doing so, whether moral or actual, are too great and/or too many to ignore. Contrarily, however, I tend to demonize domestic affairs, as it seems regular citizens are perpetually having to fight to make sure our country doesn't slide backwards socially. My idea of what "backwards" and "forwards" are are equally biased - for example, I think a whole lot of people value certain "key" issues that I think are almost entirely irrelevant and couldn't really care either way about. I think that we are currently treading a very fine line with our "mandate of heaven"...but as there seems to be no better replacement that would not be just as corrupt and backwards as we are if given the chance...best to try and change things domestically, even if it does seem ever hopeless. Point is, I'm biased, you're biased, everyone's biased. Bruce's comment suggesting that neither CNN nor BBC are biased made me actually laugh out loud - of course they are, they're Western news corporations. Western corporations, for goodness' sakes. How could they not be biased? It's literally, (I think anyways), an impossibility. Their continued good future relies on the West dominating economically and socially...militarily, too, I suppose. So naturally, they value certain things that other non-Western sources might not - hence why RT, for example, is hardly ever likely to agree with Western sources on any West vs. Russia issues - because both sides are biased and naturally, as naturally as humans think and breathe, value things differently as a result of what they are. They might represent the "two sides" - as if there's a finite two sides to anything - of an issue to some degree, but that hardly makes them unbiased. Neither one is right or wrong, even if what they tell are complete physical lies - just serving different agendas, as everyone does. Whatever narrative someone presents - even if it is the very lack of one - shows a bias. P.S. I hate it when I make long-winded posts like this that actually don't say anything at all. Oh well. If for nothing else besides a record of what I was thinking of at this time...

Hm. Everyone seems to assume that the Republican Party is bought and paid for - yet there seem to be many that don't realize the same about the Democrats. I would warrant that that makes them the superior propagandist of the two...but maybe that's just me.

Suddenly, I feel like I'm on a Rareware forums discussing Stop 'n Swop theories...

Terranigma - an old SNES JARPG. I don't normally play JRPGs due to certain elements making me not a fan of the genre - and this one is no exception - but as I had played it for a bit many years back, I found myself suggesting it to a friend who was enjoying the Ys series, and then later found myself playing it alongside him. Moderately enjoyable. Eufloria - a lite real time strategy game based on the premise of creating a sort of flower empire in certain (somewhat random, within certain parameters) scenarios laid out for you. You conquer "worlds" with "seeds", plant them en masse in the worlds to produce more seeds to conquer other worlds. I bought it many years ago on Steam, tried it then and thought it was okay but didn't make it through. Restarted a few days ago and found that I liked it more now than I did then, and beat the main game, and am now trying the harder difficulty.

Pros: Sadly irrelevant in my case. Awesome sprites/paperdolls by Erephine and co. Seriously. Various other things. Cons: I am a so called "purist" and don't like the addition of new content that I haven't personally approved. The new party members (that I basically consider to be fanfic grafted onto the games) bother me enough that although I could remove them easily enough with DLTCEP or Near Infinity, I feel as though the developers had their priorities so incredibly mixed up for these "enhanced editions" that I am loath to support them. I think I would actually be more inclined to recommend them if they had a $5 "remove all this extra stuff" DLC. I probably still wouldn't, of course, because that'd be utter nonsense, but nevertheless. That's in addition to not all mods working correctly...which means if I'm actually playing, I'm playing non-EE, regardless of all other factors. Had at least the NPCs and their relevant quests been split off into like a $5 DLC, it would be oh so much easier for me to be happy with the games. I probably would've even bought it, (though I would've had it disabled). My idea of "enhancing" a game does not involve adding a bunch of half-baked junk that sticks out like a sore thumb that I (with no prior history of expertise to suggest that it would actually fit in the game) thought up myself in an afternoon. Away with you, beggar!

Yeah, the hardcore aim was ridiculous. Sitting at the very edge of my Dragunov's scope, barely able to make out enemies, crouched down and in partial cover, meanwhile they are hitting me with almost perfect accuracy with assault rifles. I'm glad I've personally modded Stalker enough to have an idea of how to fix (at least some of) the concerns you guys mentioned in otherwise good mods...though I'll have to admit to not having tried the Misery mod. SHoC is more my default Stalker "experience" / base game than CoP.

...or convince people to buy both equally, which seems to be the main strategy of most entertainment industries in general.

... n.... no? Where did I ever say that? I... I said the exact opposite of that. Is Obama rounding citizens up and having them executed in concentration camps? Is he locking foreign tourists up because he suspects them of being gay? Is he refusing food, water, and basic quality of life materials to his citizens? Is he personally overseeing every horrendous crime in America? You're responding to Calax as if their post had been directed towards you.